Your Netflix account is going to get a lot more personalized, and it starts with the way you rate content.
The streaming service will change its traditional five-star rating system to an At the Movies-style thumbs up or down.
“Five stars feels very yesterday now,” Todd Yellin, Netflix’s vice president of product innovation, said at a press conference Thursday. “[The system] really projects what you think you want to tell the world. But we want to move to a system where it’s really clear, when members rate, that it’s for them, and to keep on making the Netflix experience better and better.”
Making the ratings system less granular may seem like a step backward, but the company claims to have beta tested the feature with hundreds of thousands of users last year, and it achieved more than 200 percent more ratings than with the five star setup.
Netflix previously showed the overall rating of a movie with yellow stars and a user’s personal rating with red. It used a combination of those ratings to showcase more customized content to individual users. The streaming service will expand how it personalizes content by displaying a match percentage rating that predicts how much a user would enjoy a particular video.
The new system will be released sometime next month.
H/T the Verge